the same nigh-impregnable political heights of the old kings and aristos, and my tentative hunch is to classify people like Mussolini and Hitler with the radicals. ("National socialism" is a good summary of the demands of 1848 radicals, in fact!)
-
Show this thread
-
Conservatives in places like the United States are basically just especially order-focused liberals. Which is unsurprising, because it sure looks like liberalism ate the world. The bourgeois didn't complete their takeover of the political world in 1848 but the trend . . .
4 replies 0 retweets 5 likesShow this thread -
has been toward a near-total victory in the West. Liberals wanted, basically, constitutional government; civil order; and strong protections for personal property. These are the norms everywhere in the West, and frequently abroad. The norms are so strong . . .
1 reply 0 retweets 6 likesShow this thread -
that even governments and societies that ignore them feel obliged to at least adopt the appearance. For example, consider the following: NORTH KOREA HAS A CONSTITUTION AND CALLS ITSELF A REPUBLIC North Korea is obviously a hereditary authoritarian dictatorship, and . . .
1 reply 1 retweet 8 likesShow this thread -
it's not even Western! But it still keeps up with the formal, universally-accepted way of establishing *legitimacy*, which today is having a constitution and being a republic.
1 reply 0 retweets 8 likesShow this thread -
This is directly analogous to (in days past) fabricating a pedigree for your "king" stretching back to Troy, or perhaps direct descent from Adam or from the Gods themselves.
1 reply 1 retweet 8 likesShow this thread -
obligatory I guesshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8bqQ-C1PSE …
1 reply 0 retweets 1 likeShow this thread -
Anyway, the liberal victory is complete, and the old conservatism is probably utterly spent as a political force. What of the radicals? Being a radical in 1848 probably meant you wanted some combination of (i) national self-determination, (ii) economic redistribution, and
1 reply 0 retweets 4 likesShow this thread -
(iii) big-D Democracy, as in: universal male suffrage, or something like it. (i) was mostly achieved (badly) during the World Wars, although it still perhaps animates radical left ideas about Colonialism and radical right ideas about cultural purity maybe
2 replies 0 retweets 3 likesShow this thread -
(iii) is the norm everywhere that has a de facto republican government. So, maybe a good narrative is this: The 1848 liberals won broadly. Conservatism was ultimately crushed. What we have today are ongoing skirmishes between liberals and radicals, the latter . . .
1 reply 1 retweet 5 likesShow this thread
being split left and right, where the left cares about the 1848 radical preoccupation with economic redistribution, and the right cares about 1848 radical preoccupation with nationalism. Hmmmm. (?????) Anyway back to work, thanks for reading my incipient model.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.